butterknife 0.2.0

Butterknife makes bare-metal Linux deployment dead-simple using the Linux Containers (LXC) and Btrfs filesystem.

Introduction

Butterknife command-line utility can be used to serve snapshots via HTTP; send and receive snapshots over SSH and multicast; list local and remote snapshots.

Installation

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install lxc python3-dev cython3 python3-pip pigz btrfs-progs
sudo apt-get install python3-lxc # Ubuntu 14.04 or older
sudo pip3 install jinja2 click falcon

Install Butterknife:

sudo pip3 install butterknife

Listing templates

List local templates at /var/lib/butterknife/pool:

butterknife list

List local templates in a particular directory:

butterknife list file:///path/to/directory

List templates at /var/lib/butterknife/pool on a remote machine via SSH:

butterknife list ssh://hostname

List templates at remote machine via HTTP:

butterknife list http[s]://hostname[:port]

Pushing/pulling templates

Currently pull over SSH is working. Following replicates /var/lib/butterknife/pool from machine hostname to local pool at /var/lib/butterknife/pool:

butterknife pull ssh://hostname

You can also pull via HTTP:

butterknife pull http://butterknife.koodur.com

Note that symmetric push/pull requires patched btrfs-progs which has additional -p and -C flags for btrfs receive.

Multicast

Sending local template via multicast:

butterknife multicast send @template\:com.koodur.butterknife.Ubuntu\:x86_64\:snap7

You can even multicast a remote subvolume:

butterknife multicast send @template\:com.koodur.butterknife.Ubuntu\:x86_64\:snap7 --pool ssh://hostname

Receiving to local pool at /var/lib/butterknife/pool:

butterknife multicast receive

systemd-nspawn workflow

Create a btrfs subvolume for your butterknife image under /var/lib/machines. Replace ArchLinux with your image name you want to use.

sudo btrfs subvolume create /var/lib/machines/ArchLinux

Install base system in there

sudo pacstrap -i -c -d /var/lib/machines/ArchLinux base

Nspawn into it and customize your container

sudo systemd-nspawn -M ArchLinux
# do your thing

You will also need some scripts that will be ran on snapshot creation and when doing deployments with provision image.

look into the puppet-butterknife repository for scripts and files you should add

Create butterknife config file in /var/lib/machines/ArchLinux/etc/butterknife/butterknife.conf

[template]
name=ArchLinux

Also make sure that you have something like this on your host etc/butterknife/butterknife.conf config file

[global]
namespace=org.example.butterknife
endpoint=https://butterknife.example.org

Take a snapshot of your image

butterknife nspawn release ArchLinux

And now you should be ready to serve that image to your clients